The Perfect Present

by Karen Swan

‘I know perfectly well that Cat and Min aren’t close. Including Min in this necklace is an anomaly that will stand out to Cat immediately, and will show her that I know about the affair.’ He inhaled sharply. ‘I – and that I forgive her.’

  ‘You’re going to just forget about it?’

  ‘I never said that. But it’s in the past. The affair was never about him anyway – he’s just a symptom of her problems. Cat’s damaged, Laura – you know that now. She’s spent her whole life feeling like her birth had to compensate for Daniel’s death. She had to be her parents’ saviour, even though it meant destroying her relationship with her sister in the process, and for what? They divorced anyway. She failed. Wherever she looks at her family, she failed. She thinks she let them down, and now she thinks she’s let me down. But I won’t give up on her, Laura –’ his voice dropped ‘– not even for you.’

  What? Laura felt the shock ricochet through her at his unexpected words. ‘I . . . would never ask you to,’ she faltered.

  A beat pulsed. ‘I know.’

  His eyes held hers and the world stopped spinning – just for a second, but enough to make her feel weightless and giddy, as if she was floating from one world into another. What couldn’t – wouldn’t – be said crashed off the walls, buffeting them both with a physical force that almost knocked her off her feet.

  He turned away, shaking his head slowly. ‘But it’s . . . it’s pointless to . . .’ His voice trailed away. It was pointless to even finish the sentence. They let silence fill the air. Rob paced back to the window.

  ‘I can’t just turn my back on her. She’s my wife. Another man broke her heart and she’s been through hell because of it. I’ve had to stand back, pretending I didn’t know, but I can’t do it any more. The guilt’s destroying her. She wouldn’t let me near her for months after the affair ended; she even went to see a therapist, supposedly to talk through her childhood, but it isn’t going away, not really. She pretends to care about clothes and parties, dabbles a bit in design projects, but you saw for yourself on Friday what she does to get through. She’s sinking – she can’t do it alone. It’s time for her to know that I know and that we’ll get through it together.’

  ‘But why don’t you just confront her, then? Why bother with this necklace at all? Why did you have to drag m-me into it?’ Laura cried. Couldn’t he see what he’d done to her? Her life had imploded as a result of this necklace . . . as a result of him . . .

  He walked up to her in three strides, placing his hands on her trembling arms. ‘I’m so sorry, Laura,’ he said in a low, urgent voice. ‘Getting involved with you was the very last thing I thought would happen. I never imagined I could feel for anyone else what I feel for Cat. Falling for you was not part of the plan.’

  Laura felt herself reel from his words as he immediately stepped back away from her, back to a distance they were both safe with.

  ‘But if she’s going to believe that I forgive her,’ he continued, ‘then she first has to believe that I understand her too, and this necklace is my best chance of proving that to her. I have to try, Laura.’

  Laura watched him, letting her heart break in silence. He mustn’t hear it. His love for Cat was unconditional, untouchable, as it should be. There was nothing more to be said.

  ‘It’s in my bag. I’ll go and get it for you,’ she said with effort, unable to meet his eyes, too scared they’d betray her.

  She unlocked the door and walked towards the sitting room. Only Cat and Alex were in there now, chatting nonchalantly by the windows and surrounded by the party planners tidying away around them. Laura saw that all her charms had been neatly packed into the boxes as someone checked off the inventory she’d made. She watched the charade as Cat, dressed in a strapless gold crêpe minidress, chatted amiably to Alex in low tones, his gaze soft and smitten on her face.

  ‘Oh, there you are!’ Cat said, hearing Laura’s footsteps. ‘And what exactly were you doing locked away in a room with my husband?’ she teased, standing up.

  ‘Rob was talking me through a tax-break set-up for the business, now that it’s gone to the next level,’ Laura replied, thinking on her feet, as Rob followed down the hall after her.

  ‘Well, if we’re all ready . . .’ Alex said, jumping up nervously, his eyes diverted from Rob’s as he motioned towards the door.

  Rob caught Laura’s eye and gave the barest of headshakes. She would have to give him the necklace at the party.

  ‘Okay, so let’s go,’ Rob said with a tight smile, making a beeline for Cat and bending down to kiss her. ‘It’s no good having a birthday party with no birthday girl.’

  ‘I can’t wait to find out what you’ve got up your sleeve this year,’ Cat smiled. ‘I didn’t think anything could beat last year’s surprise party in the Serpentine Gallery.’

  ‘We’ll be right with you. I’ll just help Laura with this bag,’ Alex called after them as they descended the stairs.

  ‘What happened? What did he want?’ he demanded, anxiety crawling over him like ants as soon as they were out of sight.

  Laura shot him a look of withering disdain. ‘He knows all about you and Cat. He has done since the beginning. But he’s not going to give her up, Alex. He doesn’t see you as a threat. He refuses to roll over and let his marriage die.’

  Her words settled like blows. No threat?

  She reached down and snapped shut the lid on a tower of stackable boxes. ‘It’s over, Alex. Tonight he’s going to let Cat know that he knows. That’s what the necklace is all about.’

  ‘No. I don’t believe you.’ Alex stared at her. ‘I know Rob. He scarcely tolerates me as it is. He’d knock ten bells out of me if he knew I was sleeping with his wife and he certainly wouldn’t invite me to go skiing in Verbier.’

  ‘Actually, he would. Every charm on the necklace tells Cat’s story, right up to the very last one that points the finger at your affair. He knows that Cat’s a product of her past, and he’s using the necklace to show her that he not only knows about you both, but he forgives her too. He’s going to show her that her relationship with you only began as a direct result of her broken childhood.’

  Alex laughed softly. ‘When we were seventeen, maybe. But this affair with me began as a direct result of the miscarriage.’

  ‘Miscarriage?’ The shock was like a slap. ’But Rob’s never once mentioned they were pregnant. Why wouldn’t h—?’

  His expression stopped her.

  ‘Oh God. They weren’t . . .’ she whispered.

  Alex shook his head and Laura instinctively held her breath as the full ramifications of his words sank in: their affair started up only after the miscarriage? So then the baby hadn’t been his either.

  ‘Whose baby was it?’ she demanded.

  ‘She never told me his name, and I never asked. I didn’t want to know who the bastard was – he’d succeeded where Rob and I failed. But he propelled her back into my arms, so what did I care? I was just happy to get her back.’ He sighed heavily at the memory. ‘God, she was a mess. I’d never seen her like that. She just turned up on my doorstep in Milan one day and seduced me in my own damned porch – straight back to our old ways. Because when the chips are down, it’s always me she comes back to.’

  He looked back at Laura. ‘What? Why are you looking at me like that? Cat knows I know the score. She knows I’ll never ask more from her than she’s prepared to give. Don’t you get it? Rob can’t help her, Laura! He suffocates her. Do you have any idea what it’s like for her living with a man who adores her so completely, and who she just doesn’t feel anything for in return?’

  Laura stared at him, mute. She knew exactly how that felt. Poor, sweet Jack had been alone in their relationship too; she had never been able to match his devotion. Was this what had drawn her and Cat together?

  ‘Their entire life is an act, Laura. Look, don’t get me wrong. Cat doesn’t want to hurt him. She loves him as much as she can, but it’s just not in the way he wants. He knows the marriage is on its k
nees. Her husband is not the man she loves – but neither am I.’

  Laura looked at him and saw all the devastation in his eyes she would have expected to find in Rob’s. For all his two-faced treachery to Rob, Alex’s love for Cat was true. She had known it in Verbier.

  ‘Then who is? I saw her with my own eyes. When she got out of that car, she practically floated across the floor.’

  He winced at her words. ‘I don’t know. But I don’t have a car in this country.’

  ‘So then it’s his car,’ she murmured. ‘She’s cheating on both of you. She’s seeing him again.’

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Even in the dark, a camel with territorial issues has a distinctive sound all its own, and Sugar scored a bullseye on the passenger-side window as they passed, indicating that they had arrived. At only just gone half past eight, they were pretty much on time; traffic had been forgivingly light, which they had all – for their own reasons – been grateful for. Laura could feel a definite edge in the atmosphere between the four of them, as though there were invisible blades hanging from the ceiling that only showed themselves in the glint of the lights of passing cars. Occasionally, Rob had stretched his hand over from the steering wheel on to Cat’s lap, squeezing her thigh – a gesture not missed by either Laura or Alex in the back seat – as Cat turned the music up higher and higher, ready to party, and drowning out the possibility of easy conversation.

  Laura had taken the opportunity to think and reassess, ignoring the weighty stares Alex kept throwing her in the dark as newly revealed facts tumbled around in her head. Rob’s motives for commissioning the bracelet had been more double-sided than she’d ever realized. Its message was as much about forgiveness as about love, but Rob didn’t know as much as he thought he did. How prescient he’d been on the plane when he’d said she’d end up knowing more about his wife than he did.

  Laura almost groaned with relief when she set eyes upon Kitty’s crooked cottage again. The lights inside glowed orange and welcoming, and after chandeliers and marble, it felt so good to scale back down to an ordinary home – particularly this one, with its round-the-clock cakes, animal residents and feral children.

  Cat clearly didn’t agree and she shot Rob a shocked look as they parked. ‘Seriously?’ she whispered.

  ‘What? Don’t be like that,’ he murmured back. ‘Kit wanted to do this for you. She pleaded with me. You know she’s been asking for years. It gets embarrassing having to keep coming up with excuses for you, Cat. Why can’t you just let her, for once?’

  ‘It’s my birthday, Rob,’ Cat hissed. ‘You said it would be somewhere special.’

  The front door was on the latch, and Nat King Cole was crooning not too loudly on the record player in case he should wake the kids. Pocket, who deigned to come to the door to greet them for once, was wearing tinsel round her neck and a forlorn expression since her sofa had been requisitioned for the party and had a tower of coats thrown over it. The small Christmas tree in the hall had taken a significant turn for the worse since Laura’s last visit a week ago, and now looked like it had been shaved, the gingerbread decorations openly half eaten.

  Joe looked up from pouring some drinks as they trooped in, smiling broadly at Rob, marginally less at Cat and Alex, and not at all at Laura.

  ‘Well, that’s what I call timing!’ he said, placing glasses in everyone’s hands. ‘Cat, happy birthday,’ he said, kissing her properly on one cheek (he didn’t approve of continental-style double kisses). The fire behind them was leaping so high, Laura wouldn’t have been surprised if you could see the flames peeking out of the top of the chimney, and she took a step away. She was quite warm enough in her velvet tux.

  ‘Thanks, Joe. Where’s Kit?’ Cat asked, carefully lifting her foot over Pocket’s water bowl, which had somehow been pushed into the middle of the kitchen floor. Joe – looking surprisingly distinguished in a loden blazer and cranberry-pink cords rather than his usual boiler suit and mud – removed it without comment.

  ‘Still upstairs, having a wardrobe freak-out. Nothing fits apparently.’ He shook his head. ‘But then she says that every time and she always ends up looking lovely.’

  ‘I’ll g—’ Laura began.

  ‘Let me go sort her out,’ Cat smiled, patting Joe’s hand. ‘I’ve got her birthday present in the car.’

  Laura closed her eyes in dismay, remembering too late that it was Kitty’s birthday in four days – Kitty had told her they’d always shared their parties as children – and realizing she had nothing to give. Yet again, she was impinging upon their hospitality and turning up empty-handed. She wondered whether the bottles of Piper still in her bag would suffice.

  Cat disappeared, the light wattage in the room appearing to dim with her departure.

  ‘It looks like you’ve got everything nicely under control here,’ Rob said, making small talk as Laura and the three men lapsed into an awkward silence. She instinctively knew that her presence was inhibiting them from diving straight into talking about the Premiership and poor pheasant numbers.

  ‘Yep. Kitty’s been cooking for England these past few days – there’s been no stopping her. It’s like therapy or something. She’s got herself in a right state about tonight.’ His eyes – flint-hard and cold – met Laura’s for the briefest of moments. ‘The others are in the drawing room waiting for you – let’s go through and talk in there.’

  They filed through the tiny hall into the drawing room, Laura quickly ducking into the boot room to deposit the bags. When she’d stayed here as a guest, the drawing room had been out of bounds, with the heating turned off and the door very firmly shut (‘to keep the ducks out,’ Kitty had sighed). Tonight, it had come to life and twinkled like a tree decoration. Long and low-beamed, with an antique pink and brown marble fireplace in the middle, home-made stockings were hanging from nails banged into the walls ready for tomorrow night. There were thick, squashy sofas in faded strawberry velvet, pale green curtains and table covers trimmed with heavy braided bullion, and a deeply pocketed square ottoman sat squatly amidst all the sofas. Although the scheme was undeniably ‘tired’ and Eighties, it still managed to evoke a faded grandeur.

  There were a few – not many, but nice – antiques dotted about too, and an abundance of candles cast a gloriously flickering and flattering light. Laura particularly liked the unfashionable cut-crystal bowls that had been filled with glistening pomegranate seeds so that they looked like pirates’ treasure, and the door and window frames were draped with thick home-made (so therefore slightly uneven) swags of eucalyptus and holly berries that hung extravagantly to the floor like fur scarves. And in the middle of the room, just to the right of where they were congregated, a huge swirl of mistletoe hung from the central beam like a piñata, swinging so low that Rob, Alex and Joe had to dodge to avoid it.

  Laura took one look at the Christmas tree in the corner and instantly forgave the pale imitation in the hall – Christmas wasn’t anywhere near as patchy in the Baker household as she might have been led to believe. Thick, bushy and the blackest of greens, Laura guessed it had been hacked from the nearby woodland; the fresh pine scent fragranced the room more beautifully than any Jo Malone home spray. Beneath the lower fronds, dozens of parcels wrapped in snowman paper (obviously a jumbo roll) were peeking through. At the back, Laura could see a shape that was clearly a bicycle, but wrapped nonetheless from handlebars to wheels, with an enormous yellow rosette on top. From the size of it, she guessed it was for Tom.

  Laura took in the other guests as she stood at the doorway – David, Sam and Orlando were standing by the ancient fireplace – and realized it was Verbier Mark II.

  ‘Finally!’ Sam exhorted with customary charm and grace as she caught sight of them.

  ‘Sorry, we got a little caught up,’ Rob said, soothing her with a kiss. ‘The girls had a party in London first.’

  ‘The girls . . . ?’ Sam echoed.

  ‘Cat and Laura. It was a launch do for Laura’s business.’
r />   ‘Oh! And what was I? NFI?’ Sam asked tetchily.

  ‘Cat knew she’d be seeing you here. Besides, it was just a business thing, wasn’t it, Laura?’ Rob said diplomatically as he looked across at her, giving no indication of the intimate and emotionally charged conversation they had shared just an hour earlier. ‘By the way, did Penryn show?’

  ‘Yes, he did,’ Laura nodded, scarcely able to meet his eyes. He had a right to know what was going on in his own marriage, but did it have to be her who told him? ‘It’s all going ahead for the Fashion Week tents. And he’s going to introduce me to the buyer at Liberty.’

  ‘What an achievement – congratulations!’ David said, leaning down to kiss her. ‘And I trust your family emergency was sorted? We did so miss you, even just for those last few hours.’

  Laura blushed to remember her flight from Verbier and she kept her eyes well away from Rob’s. ‘Thank you, yes. A false alarm.’

  ‘Bella!’ Orlando roared, bounding over. ‘You look divine! Such a fashion plate – who knew, uh? You look just like one of my ladies.’

  ‘I look nothing like your ladies, Orlando,’ Laura smiled. ‘I would stick out like a robber with a swag bag next to them.’

  ‘Mmm – before maybe. But now . . . I love it, this suit. It reminds me of someone else . . .’ he said meaningfully, and Laura realized he was referring to his and Cat’s escapade in Milan. ‘I think I can guess who took you shopping.’ Orlando pulled the jacket forward a little and caught a glimpse of the floppy silk shirt beneath. ‘Although it would have been even sexier with nothing underneath it,’ he grinned.

  ‘Funnily enough, I like to be fully dressed when I go out,’ Laura chided, prompting an amused chuckle from David.

  ‘Enough of this chit-chat – where’s Cat?’ Sam interrupted. ‘I want to get on with the main event and see this damned necklace once and for all. I want to see how Laura’s represented me.’ Her tone suggested there was an ‘or else’ element to the statement. ‘You have got it with you, I hope? We wouldn’t want any awkward best man moments.’